You can’t joke, she says. I can do whatever the hell I want.
That earns her a smile. She sits and leans into his shoulder. He leans into hers.
The FDNY has issued a statement, which they’ve asked us to read for the benefit of hotel guests who may be unable to get through on the dedicated line.
Continue to shelter in place. Do not leave your rooms unless accompanied by fire department personnel. The FDNY is aware of the location of every guest and is making plans for your evacuation. We urge you to remain calm. Make sure your doors are shut completely, and block your ventilation ducts with any available materials, such as blankets or pillows.
Gold stars for us, he says. Get you anything from the bar, my lady?
She watches him root around in the fridge. Gold stars. They’re well-fortified, tucked in to wait for rescue. All guests are accounted for. Even the pseudonymous ones.
Are there others in the building right now, people like them, who shouldn’t be here, but are? Maybe they passed some of them on the stairs, everyone averting their eyes as they slipped back to their rooms. Other Graces, other Normans, who aren’t here as their real selves, but as slightly skewed versions. Who talk and think and fuck differently, in service to their personal deceptions.
Why is she so hung up on what he named her? Compared to the lies they’ve both told to keep coming to rooms like this one, the hundreds, thousands of lies, to spouses, friends and families, to themselves—aname is nothing! Hell, she changes her identity every time she walks through one of these doors.
She has lied, and lied, and lied. Categorically, provisionally and by omission. She has lied to the whole world. And now she’s lost.
She rises and heads to the window. Is this an existential crisis? Now, when she might be about to stop existing? She presses her forehead against the glass. You exist. You’re here. The room is here. Nick is here. Breathe. He came to her the instant the building began to sway. He held her tight. It must have been an instinct, like his jokey bravado. Instinct, too, when he dragged her away from Edvin—kept her from being hauled off, anyway, until she could pull herself together.
He returns to the bed with a bottle of green juice. She checks his phone. On news site after news site—The New YorkTimes, TheWashington Post,USA Today,TheWall Street Journal,TheGuardian,The Financial Times—the fire is the top story.
Breaking
Developing
Leading
9+ updates
It’s frustrating, how he’s constantly having to rescue her. Is it an instinct, or something learned? Maybe men are conditioned to protect women. To attack and destroy them, too, of course. Are the impulses connected—to save and to ruin? Stemming from the same attitude toward women’s bodies. Not ownership, exactly. Some kind of managerial urge.
Has she been trained to collapse, then, to need male managing? Can’t she keep her shit together on her own? She wouldn’t have expected it before tonight, all the tenderness he’s shown, the care. Or the far-from-heroic shit he’s been up to, either. Not to mention his surprising confessions: about his marriage, how he was afraid he was losing her.
How did she fall in love with him when she didn’t really know him? What did he say—insufficient information never stops it from happening. You gather scraps and fragments, and project the rest. Your creation holds together, or it doesn’t.
Maybe if she’d known him in all his fullness, she never would have loved him.
Or maybe she never would have stopped.
Well, but she did.
She did.
She goes to a site that tracks trending topics across social media. The fire is number three.
The whole world is fixated, she says.
It’s a Tuesday night in February, he says. Nothing else is happening. And this is hot stuff—pun intended. A burning building, loaded with rich people? What’s not to love?
People don’t love this, Nick. They’re horrified. It’s a compelling story, sure, but they want a happy ending.
What they want, Jenny, is a high body count.
God you’re cynical! Remember the Thai kids stuck in the cave? People around the world were praying for them. And those Chilean miners from way back? Nobody was watching that ordeal thinking, gee, I can’t wait to see them haul a bunch of dead bodies out of that pit.
There’s a big difference between us and the Chilean miners, he says. They were hardworking bastards who got stuck in a hole in the ground. We’re wealthy assholes trapped in a three-thousand-dollar-a-night hotel room. Trust me, the world wants to see us suffer. We…why are you looking at me like that?
You paid three thousand dollars for this room?
